Sunday, March 13, 2011

Garnaut, Minchin - warming or cooling, the earth does its own thing

Senator Ross Garnaut has a PhD in economics from ANU and Senator Nick Minchin has a BA in Law and Economics, neither appear to have the qualifications to talk about whether or not the world is cooling or warming. Ross Garnaut has worked with Profs Frank Jotzoand Stephen Howes from ANU and Professor Peter Sheenan from Victoria University on various reports for the Garnaut Climate Change Review. They're all economists, none are climate scientists and yet so much store is put in their words. ABC TV reports yesterday (Internet and short tweets ) that Nick Minchin said the globe is more likely to be cooling appeared (as Steve said in his post below), rather divisive placed as they were underneath dramatic televised images of the Japanese earthquake. What was intended. That we read the earthquake as yet another example of global warming or cooling? I wish the media would stop treating viewers like they are idiots. However, having said this there is much speculation over the Internet and on Twitter as to whether the HAARP facility is responsible for causing the recent earthquake in Japan, even though Japanese people and the world are aware that Tectonic plates and fault lines have been responsible for all recordable earthquakes that have occurred in their region. I tire of all this speculation. I believe, as others do that the organic world has its own ebbs and flows, it is powerful and sometimes extremely frightening as it goes about doing what it does. I like this short descriptive piece of text I found on the Internet this morning, written by B.E. Mahall and F.H. Bormann on the Physorg website

The Earth has its own set of rules, solidly grounded in laws of physics and chemistry and emergent principles of geology and biology. Unlike our economic model, these are not artificial constructs. They are real, and they govern. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, 100-year floods, massive wildfires and disease epidemics are dramatic examples of parts of nature, neither all service nor all harm, creating and destroying, and governed by rules that are indifferent to humans. Our anthropocentric economic model for interacting with the world ignores and is proving to be incompatible with Earth's rules, and is therefore on a direct collision course with them.

To achieve a more accurate model of our relation to nature, we need to see ourselves as part of nature, governed by nature (not economics), beholden to nature for ecosystem services and subject to nature's disturbances.

We need to view our existence in nature as dependent on numerous functions we are unable to perform ourselves, and without which we couldn't survive. And we need to recognize that we now have the power and the reckless inclination, driven by shortsighted anthropocentrism, to disrupt these functions to the degree that Earth will become uninhabitable for us.